Hi Hilmar,

Of course when Microsoft introduced the archive bit with early releases of MS DOS, it had little concern about needing a mechanism for incremental backup that would work across a wide range of supported file systems. MSDOS only supported there one file system.

In UNIX, and especially Linux, a much broader view was obviously taken. Linux particularly support a wide range of file systems, as anyone that works with a non-supported file system can remedy the situation by developing support and contributing it back to the community. This has resulted in a wide range of file systems being supported under Linux. There are usually reasons behind why things evolve in certain ways.

Regards,

Leland